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Love this, but iirc this was very common back in the day. Many of the XT, AT, 286, 386, 486 clones came with these types of triple AA battery packs, some with shrink wrap around them. It was easy to cut the shrink wrap and replace the cells with generic AA.



That's my recollection as well. RTC batteries from this era often came in four possible flavors:

* Varta barrel battery, subject to leaking and corroding traces

* AA/AAA style brick + leads to motherboard, easy to replace

* Dallas DS1287 epoxied battery + chip - can be replaced, cut into to tap directly into the chip, or replaced with Necroware's nwX287 RTC module [0]

* Lastly, the standard CR2023 style. I started seeing these appear in later 486 Socket 3 boards, very rarely on anything earlier

[0] https://github.com/necroware/nwX287




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